


The Golden Bird

by Garonne



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Early Days, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 19:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5639752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garonne/pseuds/Garonne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, when I was young and as yet completely unknown to the public, and my association with John Watson was in its early days, I found myself trapped in a cupboard with an unconscious ruffian and a female thief for company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Golden Bird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SwissMiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwissMiss/gifts).



> Many thanks to Tripleransom for beta-reading!
> 
> "...[the] arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East-End of London" (BLAC)
> 
> "While a thriving trade in singing-birds is indeed carried on in the East End, the word 'canary', in criminal slang, also refers to a female sentry posted in the street during a burglary to "sing out" if danger approaches." (Tracy's Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana)
> 
> Having two characters called Wilson and Watson in the same story can only lead to confusion, so I renamed him Belhew.

.. .. ..

Once, when I was young and as yet completely unknown to the public, and my association with John Watson was in its early days, I found myself trapped in a cupboard with an unconscious ruffian and a female thief for company. What follows is my account of the chain of events that led me there.

Earlier that night, I had been sitting in one of London's cheaper coffee houses, on the Isle of Dogs, covertly observing the other patrons. Most of them were labourers from the nearby ironworks, or night watchmen on their way to work. The smell of strong coffee permeated the room, overlying the odours of cooking from the adjoining dosshouse. It was very quiet here at this time of night, not long before closing time. Every man had his newspaper, or rather some portion or scrap of a newspaper, for it was the proprietor's economical habit to buy as few newspapers as possible and divide them up. 

The proprietor in question was a man called Wilson Belhew. I myself was currently going by the name of Albert Powell, highly skilled lock-pick, and member of Belhew's notorious gang of thieves. In the past week I'd been called upon to demonstrate my skills on a number of occasions, notably in the Hammersmith jewellery shop robbery. It went against the grain to let such acts go unpunished, never mind to participate in them myself, but I promised myself the thieves would get their comeuppance later. In the meantime, I was after a much bigger fish.

"Evenin', Albert," a voice said cheerily, interrupting my thoughts, and Nellie Brown appeared at my elbow.

One of Belhew's lines of business was the supply of canaries, those females who stood watch in the street and sang out at the approach of the forces of order. Such was Nellie's profession.

"Good evening, Nellie," I said gravely, in the guise of a serious young man from the West Country. Albert Powell had a grim dignity about him which seemed to prevent anyone addressing me as Al or Bert.

Nellie fussed with her shawl, which had slipped from around her shoulders, and gave me what she presumably considered to be a winning smile.

"Buy me a cuppa?" 

I sometimes had the impression she lived on coffee. Porter would have been more nutritious.

I laid a penny down on the table, and she scooped it up.

"Boss wants to see you," she said as soon as the coin was safely in her fist. "He's upstairs."

"Does he now?" I said, feigning indifference. I was careful not to betray the fact that this could be the chance I had been waiting for all week.

By 'the boss' she meant Wilson Belhew, of course. On the top floor of the building were Belhew's own rooms and office, to which I'd been trying all week to gain access unobtrusively. Belhew employed what seemed to me to be an almost excessive number of guards. Now, however, I had a personal invitation.

The only slight hitch was that I was expecting Watson to meet me here in the coffeehouse sometime in the next ten minutes.

I was surprised how much I had been looking forward to the meeting. In the past week, I had felt his absence more than I had expected, indeed more keenly than I would ever have admitted to him. I had been sharing rooms with him for almost a year now, during which time we had often been separated for one reason or another, without excessive suffering on my part. How odd an effect the commencement of carnal relations appeared to have on the human mind. 

The barman was standing behind the counter, wiping out cups with a greyish cloth. I crossed the room to speak to him.

"If a young man with a moustache and a Glaswegian accent comes in here looking for Albert Powell, could you tell him I'm upstairs, and ask him to wait for me here?"

He grunted in acknowledgement. I passed through the main room of the coffee house, and climbed the stairs to the upper floor, where Belhew's guards had been instructed to admit me.

Belhew himself was a tall, dapper man with an insincere smile, and a coldness in his eyes that betrayed the monster beneath the surface. 

"Good evening, Albert," he said genially, when I was shown into his office. "Can I offer you a splash of whiskey?"

He signaled to one of the lackeys who stood about the room, and soon I was sitting in one of Belhew's comfortable upholstered chairs, holding a tumbler of whiskey. I let my gaze drift casually around the room, noting where the safe was.

"You are very good at your job, aren't you, Albert?"

I shrugged. 

"It's my livelihood." 

This earned me an avuncular smile.

"Well, you just stick with me, my lad, and you'll find you're earning a very decent living indeed." He leant forward, lowering his voice. "In fact, I've got a little job for you this Saturday. But you'll have to keep your mouth shut about it -- if you know what's good for you." This last was said in a very different tone, the smile disappearing, as he let the fiend beneath the surface show for just a second.

I allowed a spark of fear to appear in my eyes.

"Count on me, Mr Belhew," I said, over-eagerly. "I can keep my mouth shut."

Belhew relaxed and sat back.

"Harry will come and get you on Saturday night, so be ready. And if I hear you've talked -- "

I presumed the intended victim was another of London's crime bosses, someone that anyone with less gumption than Wilson Belhew would never have dared to cross.

"I won't, Mr Belhew."

I quickly gulped down the rest of my whiskey, as Albert Powell would do. Then I kowtowed my way out of the office, letting the door close behind me. 

I looked up and down the corridor, and saw that fortune was favouring me: no one was in sight, and a hiding place was at hand, in the form of a storeroom filled with bedding for the fourpenny lodging house downstairs. I slipped inside and pulled the door shut. There was just enough room between the door and the shelves for me to drop to my knees and apply my eye to the keyhole.

Less than ten minutes later, I saw Belhew's men go past. A few minutes after that they were followed by Belhew himself, presumably retiring to one of his private rooms, which were also on this floor.

Now I was inside the perimeter of guards, with no one between me and Belhew's office. Moreover, no one seemed to have noticed I hadn't gone back downstairs. I slipped from my hiding place to the office and crossed the room to the safe, drawing my tools from my pocket.

I almost managed to pull it off. I had already opened the safe and located the document I wanted by the time I was disturbed. I was just putting the contents of the safe back in order when I heard voices outside the door, a man and a woman engaged in an argument. The door opened, and the man's hotly argued point about the shilling someone owed him turned into an "Oy, who are you?" directed at me.

I sprang across the room and laid him out cold with a left hook to the jaw. That left me face to face with Nellie Brown.

I hesitated. I could not bring myself to raise a hand against the opposite sex, no matter that she certainly wouldn't have hesitated to hit me.

She looked like she was about to cry out and raise the alarm, when something behind me seemed to catch her attention, and her expression changed to one of puzzlement. I saw her gaze flicker from the document in my hand to the pile of banknotes in the open safe and back. Her eyes narrowed.

"Why'd you take that and not anything else?"

She grabbed the paper and squinted at it. She couldn't read particularly well, that much was apparent. The board school had failed in its task. Finally, however, her eyes seemed to fix on one name.

"What's that about Sammy Lonsdale?" she demanded.

Sammy Lonsdale was dead, and something in her voice made me think his fate had not left her unmoved. Perhaps Lonsdale had been kind to her, during the few weeks he worked in Belhew's gang. He had been a good man, and an undercover Yarder.

I answered her in my own accent, dropping the West Country disguise.

"That paper you're holding is incontrovertible proof that Wilson Belhew ordered his murder and a dozen others."

She stared at me, her face stricken. I was thinking she could perhaps be persuaded to turn a blind eye to my presence here, when I heard footsteps on the stairs, putting paid to that hope.

She was going to sing out; it was her profession, after all. She might have let me go, had it been possible without putting herself in danger, but she surely wouldn't risk her own neck now.

But she surprised me.

"Pick up his feet," she said, going for the shoulders of the man I'd laid out cold.

I slammed the safe door shut and stuffed my tools into my pocket. There was another door in the corner of the room, and we dragged the man through it and shut it behind us. I took care to switch off the gas lamp as we passed.

We were in complete darkness once on the other side of the door. 

"Quick, quick, there's a little storage room at the far end of the corridor," Nellie whispered. She must have been terrified, but her voice was almost steady. Gone was the flirt who'd tried to charm a cup of coffee from me downstairs, and in its place someone who could act as quickly as she thought.

She led me along what seemed to be an extremely narrow corridor. When we reached our refuge it felt more like a cupboard than a room. There was scarcely enough room for the two of us and the unconscious ruffian. We seemed to be surrounded by crates, and I would be willing to wager this was where Belhew stored his stolen goods.

We both sank to the floor, placing our burden between us. Beside me, I heard Nellie let out a string of curses under her breath. I could understand her sentiments. She had just made a split-second decision that could irrevocably change her life.

At the moment, however, I was more concerned about our immediate predicament.

I laid one hand on the arm of the unconscious man, wanting to know as soon as he began to stir. Then I opened the cupboard door cautiously, careful not to let it squeak too loudly. At the far end of the corridor, I could see a thin line of light had appeared under the door we'd just come through, and at its keyhole. Someone was in Belhew's office.

By that faint illumination, I could see we were at the end of a narrow, corridor-like space, also filled with crates. 

"Is there another way out?" I asked quietly.

"No, there isn't."

A swift glance around me was enough to confirm the truth of the statement. For the moment, we were trapped.

I could conceivably try to fight my way out, particularly with the element of surprise on my side. But I was burdened with the girl and in some sense responsible for her.

The wisest course was to wait and hope whoever was in the room would soon leave. We would be safe here -- so long as no one tried to open the safe and found the door was only swung shut, and not locked.

I bitterly regretted not being armed, but Albert Powell wouldn't have been.

"I hope you still have that piece of paper, Nellie?"

In the darkness I heard a crinkling noise.

"Give it to me, if you please," I said, holding out a hand. It struck warm flesh.

"Oy, watch where you're putting your great hairy paws! Don't go getting any funny ideas, mister."

"I assure you, I have no intention of doing so."

"You going to trot out some nonsense about being a married man? Because they're the worst of 'em, I'll tell you that for free."

I didn't bother to answer, busy weighing up in my mind the idea of creeping back to the office door to peer through the keyhole. I would like to know exactly how many people were in that room. On the other hand, the corridor between it and me was so crowded with crates and boxes that the chances of my inadvertently making a noise were rather high.

" _Are_ you married, Albert?" Nellie asked after a pause.

"Yes."

"Happily married?"

"I am deeply in love and have no designs on your virtue," I said sourly.

"Bet you never tell her that."

That caught me off guard. I had been studying how the crates were stacked by the faint light at the far end of the corridor, and I went on staring at them without seeing them.

Of course I'd never said such a thing to Watson. He probably would have been surprised and disconcerted if I'd tried. Though perhaps, now that I thought about it... he might also be pleased.

After a few minutes' silence, Nellie started up again, in a voice too quiet to be heard by anyone in Belhew's office, but more than loud enough to distract me from my thoughts.

"You a copper?"

"No."

"Your accent's different all of a sudden."

"How observant of you."

She fell silent, but not for long.

"Are you a private policeman, then?"

"What?"

"Like in 'Geoffrey Riley, Terror of the London Criminal'?"

"Certainly not," I said, outraged to be compared to something from a penny dreadful. I had been in business as a consulting detective for a mere two years now, certainly not long enough for the term to have made an impression on the general populace, but I vowed that someday, no one would confuse a consulting detective with the likes of the fictional Geoffrey Riley.

She fell silent again.

In the dark, I closed my eyes and rested my head against the cupboard wall, thinking of Watson. When I took my leave of him last Monday, he'd straightened my cap, smoothed down my false moustache, and told me to be careful. I'd said something about not being accustomed to my well-laid plans going awry, but a small part of me had basked in his concern.

How strange to have a constant companion, a confidant -- someone who always had me in the forefront of his mind, as I did him. How strange to find myself reacting to events in terms of how I would recount the story to Watson later, and how he in turn would react.

This change had come upon on me quite slowly, and at first I gave it little thought. After all, I am under no illusions about the size of my ego. Why should I be surprised to find myself taking pleasure in the presence of a constant admirer? It was only later that I realised that had very little to do with it at all.

Earlier in the evening, thinking about the same question, I'd ascribed this change in myself to the purely physical side of our relations. But this explanation could be valid only on the most superficial of levels. After all, such acts were also something I'd engaged in with complete strangers.

No, I wondered if key to the puzzle could rather be the intimacy of everyday life. The comfortable, quiet evenings by the fire, and the early morning conversations, curled up in bed, talking about anything and everything. That was something quite different, and something I'd never known before.

I sat there in silence, feeling like a man who, after many years of assiduous study, suddenly finds he can understand a foreign language as his own.

"I wish you'd hit Dibbs a little bit harder," Nellie said suddenly, startling me from my reverie. "When he wakes up, the first thing he'll tell everyone is that I was there when you knocked him out."

Dibbs, I presumed, was our unconscious companion.

"The taking of human life is not something to be spoken of so lightly," I said sternly.

"Oh, and what about my life? It won't be worth a farthing once Dibbs gets out of here."

"I realise you don't know me from Adam, Nellie, but I assure you, I am not a man who abandons those who have helped me."

She sniffed, unconvinced. She had clearly learnt that the only person she could trust in life was herself.

Nellie was about my age, I judged, or perhaps a little younger. Mid to late twenties. In general I am rather better at judging a person's years, but Nellie's face had been marked by life in a way that aged her. By what paths had life led her to this moment? How many years had she spent in the clutches of a man like Belhew?

"How long are we going to wait here?" she whispered. "If someone tries to open that safe, we're done for."

So she had noticed the problem too. Very observant of her.

I wished again I had Watson and his trusty revolver with me.

That was precisely when I heard the clear and unmistakable sound of a gunshot.

Beside me, Nellie jumped like a startled animal and let out a scream, quickly stifled.

"Stay here," I ordered. I extracted myself from the cupboard, moved quickly but silently along the corridor, and put my eye to the keyhole.

Watson was standing in the middle of the office, an unconscious man at his feet. In one hand he held his service revolver. He was dressed in a worn-looking topcoat and a flat cap, and his moustache was streaked with coal dust. He has always been somewhat more skilled at disguise than he let on to his readers, when he later began to write for publication.

I pushed the door open, and Watson's face broke into a smile.

"The gunshot?" I said, though at the same time I spotted the fresh bullet hole beside his head. "Good Lord, man!"

He shrugged this off.

"He let off a shot while I was hitting him o'er the head. Went o'er my shoulder."

This was said in the broad Glaswegian accent he often used when he was in disguise. Behind me, I heard Nellie gasp, and knew she must have followed me.

I glanced at the face of the man who lay unconscious on the floor. Belhew's accountant.

"Watson, now you're as trapped as we are."

"Of course I'm not. I have an escape route. I had to knock out several men on the way in, and if we meet anyone else, well -- " He raised the revolver. "This should dissuade them from trying to hold us up."

"I don't suppose attracting attention with a gunshot was part of your plans?" I said dryly, hurrying Nellie out the door with me.

We ran along the corridor, past two unconscious Goliaths -- I gave Watson an admiring glance -- and down the back staircase. I could already hear sounds of pursuit on the stairs behind us.

We burst out a side door and into an alley. It was past midnight, and the narrow, cobblestoned space was lit only by the lights from nearby windows.

I took the lead, and we ran without stopping, through side-streets and back alleys, until we came to a busy thoroughfare. There, we jumped into the first cab we found, and ordered it to a small room I rented in Hackney, one of my many hideaways across London.

As soon as we were safely there, Nellie dropped into the room's rickety chair.

"Who's your friend, Albert?" she demanded.

"You can call him George," I suggested. "George, this is Nellie Brown."

Watson gave her a small bow. He was smiling again, and I very much wanted to kiss him. I was somewhat constrained by Nellie's presence, however.

"You saved me again, I see," I said with a quirk of the lips. It happened far more often than I would have liked, though for some reason, in later years, Watson never dwelt on that in his stories.

Now, he was grinning at me.

"Well?" he demanded.

I tapped my coat pocket, where I'd safely stowed the document I'd taken from Belhew's safe.

"It's here. And our next stop is Scotland Yard, without a moment to lose."

"Count me out," Nellie said immediately, sounding horrified.

"I had a feeling you might say that," I said dryly, "which is precisely why we made this stop off here. I suggest you wait here until we return."

Soon, I'd have to confront the problem of what to do with Nellie. Dibbs had certainly already been rescued or escaped from the cupboard in which he'd lain, and had told his tale far and wide. I intended to have Belhew and his chief lieutenants under lock and key before the night was out, but that would already be too late to save Nellie from his revenge -- and from the damage to her reputation in the streets where she lived.

Lestrade and his men had to be roused from their beds, but they were all assembled at the Yard in short order; they had been waiting for this moment all week, and there was not a man among them who was not eager to swoop down on the fiend who had killed one of their own. They went to the Isle of Dogs in force, accompanied by Watson and myself. Belhew, smiling genially, allowed himself to be arrested without protest. He had already wriggled his way free of the claws of justice several times, and his men were under standing orders to destroy all evidence in the event of a police raid.

In this case, however, it was in vain: one solitary, seemingly innocuous piece of paper was already in the possession of the Metropolitan police, thanks to Watson and myself -- and even more so, thanks to Nellie Brown.

In the cab back to my hideaway, after all the fuss had died down, I pondered the problem of what to do with her.

When we reached the room, however, Nellie was gone.

.. .. ..

The following morning dawned cold and grey. After breakfast we installed ourselves on the couch by the fire. Watson scribbled away in his notebook, and I was curled up beside him, my head on his knee.

"Watson," I said suddenly.

The scratch of pen on paper paused.

I couldn't seem to vocalise what I had intended to say, so I said something quite different instead.

"Regarding these notes you take on our cases -- I hope never to see them published under the title, 'Sherlock Holmes, Scourge of the London's Underworld'."

He laughed, startled.

"Really, Holmes, I don't have ambitions to write penny dreadfuls. And, well..." His voice took on a hint of bashfulness. "If I did try my hand at a story someday, I would probably send it to somewhere like All the Year Round, or the Strand Magazine."

"This most recent case would make a very poor story," I mused. "It required no intellectual effort on my part, no opportunity to demonstrate to the reader the deductive method in action."

Watson hummed noncommittally, clearly not willing to take the bait.

"I rather liked your Miss Brown," he said after a moment, and I knew he was thinking that people, not science, made stories. "I should have liked to get to know her better."

"I probably owe her my life, you know."

"Oh?" 

I could see him looking down at me, a puzzled frown creasing his brow.

"She paid a high price for it, too. She chose to help me instead of Belhew, and Belhew knows it."

"Holmes!" He made as though to leap to his feet, and I sat up in a hurry before I could be knocked to the floor. "We can't just leave her to her fate! You surely don't think his being behind bars will keep him from exacting revenge?"

"What do you propose I do, precisely?"

"Well -- "

His voice tailed off.

"If I knew where she was, it would be a different matter, but I don't. The only thing I can be sure of is that she's certainly _not_ in her usual haunts, or anywhere she's known, which makes tracking her down well-nigh impossible. I hope she's on a train out of London by now. I only wish I had thought to give her the fare before leaving her at my room. I should have foreseen she wouldn't trust me enough to wait for our return."

"Half a crown for a train ticket seems a rather meagre price to put on your life," Watson said mildly.

Actually, I had been thinking Watson and I could scrape together our savings, to do -- what, exactly? Even if I added it to the rewards I could possibly squeeze out of the jewellery shops Belhew had targeted, how much would that really help her, in the long term? What future did a woman like Nellie Brown have?

The thought had crossed my mind that Mrs Hudson always had many friends and acquaintances in need of housemaids, but that seemed almost an insult for someone who'd saved my life.

"I've already put an advertisement in the papers," I said.

Watson sighed and sank back against the sofa, pulling me against him again.

"I hope she sees it, that's all."

For a long time, the only sound in the room was the crackling of the fire. Watson's thigh was warm under my cheek, and his hand had come to rest in my hair. I closed my eyes.

At some point, Watson stirred, and I realised I'd been drifting off to sleep.

"Let's go back to bed," he said. "We hardly slept at all last night."

 _The same bed_ was implicit in his words. The casual intimacy of it never failed to warm me -- all the more so because we would be going straight to sleep.

Watson went to lay his notebook on the desk, while I replaced the fireguard.

That was when I remembered one of Nellie's pointed comments.

"I found myself rather missing you this past week, Watson," I said abruptly.

He stopped in the doorway and turned back to look at me. I had been wrong. He didn't look disconcerted at all. Instead, a smile had kindled in his eyes and was now spreading to the rest of his face, as though he were only slowly realising just what I was trying to say.

"You seem to have grown on me," I added, feeling an explanation was required.

He waited until I'd reached the doorway too, and then pulled me close and kissed me thoroughly.

.. .. ..

Despite the considerable efforts I expended in the days that followed, I never did manage to track Nellie down. Many decades later, however, through contacts in Canada, I did find a Nellie Brown who'd made good in the lobster trade in Nova Scotia. It was a common name, and she might have changed it, but there was a photograph that might well have been her. I liked to think it was.

By that time Watson and I had become rather well known, but if Nellie ever worked out it was Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson she'd met all those years ago, that never filtered back to us.

.. .. ..

End  
.. .. ..

**Author's Note:**

> A penny for coffee and fourpence for a bed for the night is a rather different ratio than we have nowadays, but apparently that's how it was in the late 19th century.


End file.
